Everything you are about to see is real information, drawn from the Amazon Kindle Store about 48 hours ago.

None of it is made up.

This talk is going to be a bit more nerdy than usual

There will be practical techniques

but there will also be some abstract waffly big-brain stuff

What you may have been expecting

Why is this not very helpful?

Three questions the Top 100 can't answer

1. How did a trend actually get here?

2. Is it one thing — or several different things?

3. What does it mean for MY neighbourhood?

What we actually have

• Five years of data, captured every week

• Every book — not just the Top 100

• Down to rank 40,000, not just the chart

• Reader behaviour, not only Amazon's shelves

1,278 titles

passed through the 100-slot Romance Top 100 in the last year

Your neighbourhood, not the whole store

Sports romance grew — and it became hockey

hockey    any sports romance

Any sports romance vs hockey, share of the Gay Romance Top 100, 2021–2026 (2026 = year to date).

Text

Under the hockey wave, the MM mix is shifting

College    hurt/comfort    omegaverse (staple)    a dozen familiar tropes

Selected tropes as a share of the Gay Romance Top 100, 2021–2026 (2026 = year to date).

Instead of the weather for all of planet Earth

I think what happens in your neighbourhood is actionable.

Covers

Now we can get information about covers!

It's not 'running in the cloud', it's...

Frozen chicken breast

Frozen chicken breast

Cat food shelf

Romance covers crossed from photographic to illustrated

photographic    illustrated    3d-rendered

Romance Top 100, four time points 2021-2026.

Same shift, opposite colour story

Romance    Paranormal

Left: illustrated covers — both shelves rise. Right: dark-palette covers — only Romance falls. 720-cover run, Top-100 panels.

It was the hand-drawn romcom look that won

hand-drawn cartoon    ornate-emblem (romantasy look)    painterly    digital-realist

Romance Top-100 covers by illustrated sub-style.

Author neighbourhoods

I made some networks of Also Bought and Also Read information

FILLER — every real reader neighbourhood, named

Every real also-bought neighbourhood in Romance/Fantasy/LGBTQ+ (23 of them; Erotica omitted), sized by real book count.

FILLER — Amazon's shelf vs your readers' map

Same real neighbourhoods, same positions -- the ones we'll come back to are named; the rest fade to grey.

FILLER — readers mostly stay in romance

Reader neighbourhoods from also-bought behaviour, coloured by Amazon shelf. Most are Romance.

FILLER — one 'Romance' shelf, many neighbourhoods

Amazon's single Romance shelf is really all of these separate reader neighbourhoods.

FILLER — and some neighbourhoods cross the store lines

It looks like changes in the market can happen in a few different ways

Some of them are kind of obvious

Romantasy: watch the neighbouring store

Fantasy Top 100    Romance Top 100

'Romantasy' in Top-100 blurbs. Fantasy leads Romance by ~2 quarters.

but some of them aren't

The midlist filled up years before the chart showed a crowd

Grumpy-sunshine (being published)    Random comparison terms    On the Top 100    the chart fills up (2023 Q4)

Top: is the rise real? (grumpy vs random terms, share of new releases). Bottom: what could you see? (grumpy books on the Top 100, of 100).

Hockey climbed at the top of the chart, not below it

Top 100    Deep list (101+)    external event

Share of books mentioning hockey: Romance Top 100 vs the deep list (ranks ~101–470), same scrape, by quarter.

So we went looking for what else is out there

Marriage-in-crisis: below the waterline

What a reader cluster looks like

Marriage-in-crisis: a sealed room

stays within the cluster    reaches elsewhere in Romance

Readers cross-shop within the cluster about six times more than any organic subgenre checked (author/series-excluded).

Same scan, run to now

(interim ones, anyway)

Conclusions

Changes in the market can arrive in more than one way

• Cross-store spillover — romantasy

• Broad at the top, not one book — hockey

• Below the waterline — grumpy-sunshine & marriage-in-crisis

And

Acknowledgements

Lana Love

Jennifer Hilt

Becca Syme

AJ Lancaster

TK Eldridge

Lizzie Dunlap from Pixie Covers

Elizabeth Brady

Thank you to all the authors and artists who helped with this talk

Kelly, Marija and the RWNZ conference team for giving me a chance to speak

All of you for your time and attention

Thank you for watching!

For more free resources, check out:

https://kindletrends.com/resources

I'll have the slides up post-conference (little bit knackered currently, sorry)